


A Double Realization

by Metamatronic



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: ???maybe???, Amnesia, Panic Attack, W.D. Gaster realizes he’s a fusion basically, also Gaster needs to stop pulling a Henry Jekyll and testing on himself, and doesn’t take it well, chara is physically pained by being nice, jeez i dunno, please go to sleep, slight mental breakdown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 22:34:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20956001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metamatronic/pseuds/Metamatronic
Summary: Gaster’s testing on his own soul yields some unexpected side effects.He expected to unravel, but not like this.





	A Double Realization

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoy!

1, 437 hours.

Gaster made a half-formed mark on a calendar without looking away from the glowing soul in front of him.

3,729, and still ticking upwards. It hadn’t even slowed since Gaster had begun watching it. Souls were supposed to reflect a monster’s health and any given time.

So why was Gaster’s still steadily gaining LOVE after two months of sleep deprivation?

It would have infuriated him if he had any energy left to be mad. Coffee and RedBull only went so far, and even Gaster was surprised he hadn’t collapsed from exhaustion. He had circles under his eyes so dark they looked like halloween makeup and the lights in his sockets were struggling to remain lit. A small voice in the back of his skull told him that what he was doing was a bad idea—the more rational voice, he figured—but the louder mantra was that he was in too deep to give up now. It had to be a side-effect of the Void, something he was determined to figure out the details of. He needed to. It was their only chance of getting out.

His soul was beginning to crack.

Gaster squinted at the faint line, half questioning if he was hallucinating at this point. He shouldn’t be conscious for this. Granted, he shouldn’t be conscious at all, but this was different. A monster with a damaged soul typically goes into comatose—their bodies are too weak to maintain activity while healing. So if his soul wasn’t shattering, what the hell was happening?

He took another glance, mind grinding to a realization: his soul was melting apart.

Gaster made an attempt to stand up straight, to study it further, but his body seemed to betray him. He stumbled, collapsing next to his desk in a heap. His thoughts were flying apart, out of his reach, as he lost the ability to form coherent thoughts, then sentences, then words, then—

Darkness. Endless, empty darkness.

When Gaster awoke, he couldn’t decide what had happened. Usually he was fairly good at sorting real from imagined, but the line was about as blurred as his memory—and his eyesight, at this point. He blearily rubbed his sockets.

A wave of nostalgia washed over him. He’d felt this feeling before. He pushed himself to his feet, searching for the last notes he’d taken before his blackout, and—

Someone else had been here. 

His notes were scattered haphazardly (and not his type of haphazardly, he recognized his own messiness,) around the table. He was about to go hunt down Chara for trashing his office before noticing the extra writing scribbled in the margins of his one of his notebooks. He squinted—it was in WingDings. That in itself wasn’t odd; he wrote in the margins of his notes all the time. What was odd was that he didn’t recognize the handwriting. It was better than his own.

He slowly sank into the chair by his desk, taking in the writing with a shaky breath.

‘HELLO. THIS IS A NOTE FROM WINGDINGS AS OF NOVEMBER 12, 21XX. IF YOU ARE READING THIS, THEN I RE-FUSED WITH ASTER. WE APOLOGIZE FOR WRECKING YOUR OFFICE. IT WAS FOR SCIENCE.’

Gaster stared at the note for a long time in silence. He must have reread the thing a thousand times in a few seconds. Suddenly, he was doubting his reading comprehension—surely, that didn’t say WingDings. It didn’t say Aster. It didn’t say re-fused. It clearly said...something else. Something that made sense. 

Right?

Things were slowly filtering into place. His blackout—he _had_ done this before. The day he woke up the first time. The day his life had officially begun. The day he was told he had lost his past. 

Physical trauma had been the cause. His village had been ransacked, he’d been hit over the head by one of the humans, and the psychological and physical strain had caused amnesia. It had been very cut and dry.

Except there couldn’t have been any physical trauma to his skull, he thought. Lesser blows to his head had caused the massive scars he had to this day, surely a blow that dramatic would have left a mark. So why had he believed the doctors when they had said—

Wait a minute.

The doctors hadn’t said it, had they?

Asgore had said it. Toriel had said it. They’d made that lovely scrapbook detailing all the memories he’d lost after the massacre. They’d said they didn’t care if he never got his memories back, that they’d be willing to start over, that they’d been his best friend.

Funny, they hadn’t included any pictures.

Gaster felt like he was losing his mind.

He started pacing around the room—something, anything to distract from the world crashing around him. He’d been lied to by his best friends. For years. That’s why their stories never seemed to match up, why his personality before had seemed so inconsistent, why Asgore and Toriel expected him to act in two different ways, why he’s been so eager to get out of the castle and fight a goddamn war so he didn’t have to be that someone who the royal family had held so dearly and remembered so fondly. 

Toriel had called him Din. Asgore had always hated the nickname for reasons he never mentioned. It didn’t feel like a nickname anymore. He shuddered, only to realize it wasn’t a shudder at all—he was shaking.

He’d been two people. Two separate people. With lives. With loved ones. With interests and hobbies, goals, hopes, dreams. His very existence had killed two monsters.

He leaned against his desk, taking in the whole office. Spots of red and blue danced across the walls. Sticky notes, he realized, over all the pictures, all the charts, anything he’d bothered to tape onto the walls. He took a step closer.

Different colors, different handwritings, different languages, but they all said the same thing. 

‘MINE.’

Gaster took a deep breath.

They’d been sorting through memories. His memories. They remembered.

He traced a hand over the walls. His chart of the CORE had a blue sticky note placed neatly in the corner. His pictures from college parties had red notes pasted playfully over the faces—his face, realized. Studies and theories, pictures of the lab and his crew: Blue. His RadioMew poster: red. Almost every picture of Toriel was blue. Asgore was all red. Some alternated—his brothers and his friends seemed to switch depending on the mood or occasion.

His portrait of Grillby had two sticky notes over it. The red one was childishly placed over the blue one, as if to cover it up. He had been able to fuse with Grillby, back in college. He shouldn’t have been able to do that—skeletons didn’t fuse. He hadn’t been able to explain it at the time. 

Was he even supposed to have existed in the first place? Well, obviously not, but _should he have existed?_Had he lived a life that was worth stealing two others? Fear set into his bones—if he hadn’t existed, would they have ended up here, trapped in the Void? Would they still be alive, happily living out their individual lives?

Had his existence been a wrong choice?

_Knock! Knock! Knock!_

He was shaken out of his existential crisis for a brief moment.

“Yoooooo, Gaaaaaaaaaaaster! Flowey’s gonna get Papyrus to do a backflip!” Chara’s voice rang out. “Come on out, it’s been like, a century and a half or whatever, I don’t care.” They were now using both hands to knock out mindless drumrolls on the door. Gaster pinched the bridge of his nose. For all his overthinking, he still had a massive headache. He made his way over to the door.

Chara blinked. “Wow. You look like shit,” they supplied lamely.

“Well, lovely, then it’s reflecting my mood,” he hissed. “What do you want?”

Chara paused for a moment, before looking to the side. “Er, listen, G. I think you should get out of your office. At least for a little bit, I mean. You’re gonna go bonkers sitting in there alone.”

“You’re one to give advice.” He leaned on the door frame, partly to look uninterested, partly because he thought his legs might give out.

“Yeah, yeah, listen, I’m not the…’supportive’ one.” They grimaced. “But you do make the Void more bearable, so stop being a recluse and crawl out of your coffin, you stupid bag of bones.”

Gaster’s scowl softened a bit. They truly didn’t show affection very much, to the point Gaster had speculated that whatever hormone humans released in their physical bodies of water and flesh and whatnot had ceased functioning in the little gremlin child. It made the moment all the more...fragile. Chara refused to look at anything besides their shoes.

“Papyrus is doing a backflip, you said?”

“Well, hell, at this point we’ve probably already missed it.” They pouted, rolling their eyes. Despite this, it was obvious they were more comfortable with the topic change. 

“I guess we better go see if we can still make it, then.” He prompted, closing the lab door behind him. Chara perked up with a smirk, before spinning on their heels and dashing into the woods with a ‘come on, you’ve been asleep for like a month and Azzy cried about it, like, twice!”

Gaster followed with a hollow chuckle. He would have to table his mental breakdown for now.

He had people who needed him at the moment.

**Author's Note:**

> I’ll write more about Din and Aster later, I suppose. There were a lot of backstory and lore bits sprinkled in this, but I hope it didn’t get too confusing. Let me know in the comments!
> 
> Thanks for reading! If you want to see some art of Undertale, consider checking out my tumblr @metamatronic!


End file.
